17 April 2007

26°16'41.02"S 27°53'11.72"E

14 April 2007

25°22'22.13"S 28°18'38.38"E

On the edges of Hammanskraal, there is no electricity or running water. Among the tin houses, not much grows except an occasional small tree or a patch of brown grass. The soccer field is dust. The kids play in bare feet and the neighbors come out to cheer and shout advice from the sidelines. I'm visiting for just a few hours. Trying to understand what it is I'm seeing. But there is no way for me to understand. I can eat the food, walk to the tuck shop to buy a soda, sit in the tiny square of shade, take a few pictures, ask some questions, but I'll never know.

She is 23, mother of one, owner of this tiny tin shack. Her smile is wider than the sky. She has full-blown AIDS, a CD4 count of 16 at last count. She speaks in a soft voice and laughs from time to time. She is just another poor African mother with AIDS who will die before long and I don't know what to do with that.

12 April 2007

Granny

25°28'37.73"S 28° 7'5.92"E

The sun is setting. It blazes through a single hole in the clouds to the west. I'm sitting in the doorway watching the kids playing a game that involves a tower of buckets, one ball thrown in all directions, and a great deal of shouting. At some point, the tower collapses into the red dust of the street. The inevitable argument ensues. Two houses down, music is shaking the ground, loud enough seemingly to knock down the thin corrugated walls. We are at Granny's house. In the room: Granny, four daughters, a host of children, one husband away at work. Other than him, all the men have melted away. Better things to do than take part in the dusty complexity which is life in the Soshanguve township.

SPECIAL HINT:I'm sure most of my distinguished visitors are webgeeks enough to know that you can copy and paste the coordinates I've listed in the title of this and other posts into the search window at maps.google.com, click "satellite" when the map comes up, and view a fine photograph of the EXACT SPOT ON EARTH I was writing about. But if you aren't that much of a webgeek, you can just click here. And make sure to zoom in...

11 April 2007

25°41'11.76"S 28°10'18.96"E

Different sounds at night, the same trees but different birds in them, a different feel on the street, different light in the evening and in the morning. I'm sitting beneath a canopy of trees, the sound of light traffic in the distance. The jetlag is still pulling at my eyes, making everything feel a little over-bright and over-real. I'm in Africa and I guess it's time to write a little once again.

Giant Mushrooms or Space Visitors Come To Los Angeles

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Travel Galleries

SOSHANGUVE TOWNSHIP, PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA| View exhibit |
These are from my May 2007 trip to Soshanguve, a township outside of Pretoria, South Africa. It's an interesting place, nearly 100% black South African and growing like crazy. There is beauty there, as I've tried to show, but it is also complicated, with its share of problems: AIDS, social stratification, depression and suicide, violent crime. I came away with a deep sense of the complexity involved in bringing hope to Africa.

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA| View exhibit |
In the fall of 2005, I spent a week in St. Petersburg, Russia. There's no way in a week you can absorb the power of that city's presence. These photographs do very little to communicate the grandeur and the fearsome impact of the place. As in any place I've ever been in Russia, there is an imposing sense of history added to the feeling of being very small and unimportant in the face of it all.

NORTH FROM ADELANTO| View exhibit |
I took a drive early in the year to visit family in the Pacific Northwest. I got up before dawn and pulled onto the freeway. By the time the sun came up, I was passing through Adelanto, a has been/will be town in the Mojave Desert. From there it was straight north across Death Valley and into Nevada. Early the next morning, I crossed into the southeastern corner of Oregon before spinning westward toward home. I took some pictures along the way.

CHINA| View exhibit |
In the spring of 2006 I spent a week in China. I'm not sure what I was expecting beyond some crazy traffic and a bunch of neon. In any case, what I found was a surprise in some ways. I thought that on the street I might be treated either with suspicion or completely ignored, but instead I found people friendly and curious. Oh, and they can make a mean bowl of noodles.

POLAND| View exhibit |
In the fall of 2005, I spent a couple days in Poland, mostly in Gdansk. I'm not sure what I expected, a rundown gray country maybe, but it wasn't. In fact, it was beautiful. Also, it was quiet and gracious and very Catholic. I would love to see it in the summertime.

SINGAPORE| View exhibit |
I'm not a huge lover of Singapore. A little too orderly for my taste. But there much that is beautiful about that strange, self-absorbed island city.

INDONESIA & CAMBODIA| View exhibit |
In May/June of 2005, I spent a month in Southeast Asia. I love this part of the world and am always changed when I travel there. This trip was no exception. Here are a few galleries of some of the things that changed me this time.

BARRIO SAN PABLITO, CARACAS, VENEZUELA| View exhibit |
I spent an afternoon in one of the most notorious barrios in Caracas, known mostly for its violence and drugs. But in the middle of the ugliness, something very precious is going on.

Other Galleries

DOWN| View exhibit |
Sometimes we move so fast we forget to look at where we are. Sometimes it's good to look down.